Link faces of an icosphere for modeling a geodesic dome
I don't know an efficient way to achieve a complex geodesic dome with Blender's modelling tools, but it is feasible with the Animation Nodes add-on.

If you can differentiate between the dome's polygons, e.g. based on the polygons' area, and manage to determine the polygons' orientation, e.g. based on the lengths of their sides, you can generate a replica of the original dome with the faces replaced by other meshes.



The Blender file should work with 2v and 3v geodesic spheres. More subdivisions would require modifications to the script that differentiates between the faces.
And (at least for the 3v sphere) you only end up with a closed sphere if you start with a 20 sided icosphere and add subdivisions (one or two cuts) manually in edit mode.